In the News
Center for Individual Freedom: Free Speech Victories
By Renee Giachino
Bradley A. Smith, Chairman and Founder of the Center for Competitive Politics and Former FEC Chairman, discusses three significant victories for free speech rights that directly impact average Americans, including donor privacy and the elevation of Judge Gorsuch to Supreme Court Justice.
Columbus Dispatch: Brad Smith: Prevent the reckless restructuring of the FEC
By Brad Smith
The Watergate scandal that forced Richard Nixon to resign the presidency showed the dangers of allowing one party to use the power of government against the other. In the aftermath, the Federal Election Commission was created to make sure future administrations could not abuse campaign regulations to bludgeon their opponents.
But today the FEC is under attack from members of Congress whose misguided proposal to “reform” the agency could take us back to the Watergate era. A bill co-sponsored by Rep. Jim Renacci, an Ohio Republican, would shrink the agency from six commissioners to five…
Proponents justify this radical change by pointing to gridlock at the FEC. But in fact, the FEC usually reaches a majority vote except on controversial cases – The Center for Competitive Politics’ 2015 analysis found that 93 percent of FEC decisions were bipartisan. And not all gridlock is bad. A six-member commission with three votes on each side was designed to allow gridlock when the parties are in firm disagreement over whether campaign finance laws were violated.
Free Speech
Chronicle of Higher Education: Free Speech, but Not for All?
By Ted Gup
It has always been the gateway argument for limiting speech, this idea that curtailing expression for some enhances the social and political position of others. The irony is that those who promote this position often do so to protect the underprivileged from the overprivileged, oblivious to the elitist position in which they have cast themselves as self-appointed arbiters of what speech is and is not acceptable for society at large…
It is not a matter of equality versus liberty, but as Owen Fiss, the Yale scholar of the First Amendment and outspoken champion of free speech, has argued, equality through liberty. Fiss observes that when speech has been curtailed, it has historically been the unheard, the underrepresented, and the deprived who have paid the steepest price…
Wherever speech has been controlled in the name of some higher purpose, that very purpose is at risk. Speech is not a property of the few or the many, but belongs to all equally. The fact that many Americans have not had equal access to speech, or to the political, economic, or social power it represents, cannot be remedied by its curtailment.
More Soft Money Hard Law: Disagreements about Speech Limits
By Bob Bauer
The Supreme Court in Buckley v. Valeo famously rejected the notion that the speech of some may be limited in order to lift up the speech of others. Gup goes farther, insisting that, even if speech limits are intended to have this leveling effect, they usually don’t. The historical record to which Gup appeals tends to show that well-intended speech restrictions end up working against the interests of the marginalized and underprivileged. Once limits on access to a forum may be set, choices of who may spend, and how much, must be made. Gup writes that “the advocacy of a dynamic line between protected and unprotected speech grants a license to those in power to smother dissent of all sorts….”
So, for progressives, the question presents itself- to whom are they prepared to cede that power to set speech limits? This question cannot be separated from the question of the wisdom of limits themselves. Limits are not all the same, and their design and administration, including any exceptions that are provided for, make all the difference. Someone has to decide. Gup’s point is: Beware…
That’s always the problem with limits on speech: the problem of who’s in charge.
Imprimis: The Left’s War on Free Speech
By Kimberley Strassel
We need to overhaul our disclosure laws, and once again put the onus of disclosure on government rather than citizens. At the moment, every American who donates $200 or more to a federal politician goes into a database. Without meaning to sound cynical, no politician in Washington is capable of being bought off for a mere $200. We need to raise that donation threshold. And we need to think hard about whether there is good reason to force disclosure of any donations to ballot initiatives or to the production and broadcast of issue ads-ads designed to educate the public rather than to promote or oppose candidates.
Most important, we need to call out intimidation in any form and manner we see it-and do so instantly…
Finally, conservatives need to tamp down any impulse to practice such intimidation themselves. Our country is best when it is engaging in vigorous debate. The Framers of the Constitution envisioned a multiplicity of interests that would argue their way to a common good. We succeed with more voices, not fewer, and we should have enough confidence in our arguments to hear out our opponents.
Wall Street Journal: A Vigilant Defense of Free Speech
By Daniel Shuchman
Historically, Mr. Abrams notes, progressive activists were the most absolutist defenders of free speech, while the more “conservative” elements of society flirted with various forms of censorship. After all, it was free expression, often exercised at great social and legal peril, that enabled once-radical causes-including prison reform, abolition and desegregation-to change society… Today many progressives argue that speech should be limited by who is doing the speaking. Corporations and politically active wealthy individuals, they say, speak “too much.”…
The more you may revile Citizens United (or think you do), the more essential it is to read Mr. Abrams’s principled defense of that decision and to learn how he was persuaded to change his mind about the fundamental liberty inherent in campaign spending.
For Mr. Abrams, one inescapable truth applies across the history of First Amendment disputes. To allow the government to determine whose speech can be regulated-whether a newspaper publishing leaked documents, a company funding election advertising, or a presidential candidate composing boorish tweets-is, as Mr. Abrams’s fascinating history shows, literally to play with fire.
Independent Groups
Concord Monitor: Conservative campaign finance reformer names 3 priorities
By Nick Reid
John Pudner, executive director of the organization Take Back Our Republic, points to some of the same symptoms that liberals do…
In the long run, Pudner said he foresees a constitutional amendment fully addressing money in politics, but he’s starting with smaller steps in the Republican-led Congress.
One of his priorities has taken the form of the Stop Foreign Donations Affecting Our Elections Act, a House bill sponsored by Arizona Republican Paul Gosar…
In a separate effort, Pudner said he hopes to free up resources among everyday people to be able to afford campaign donations – with the goal of giving candidates more incentive to appeal to a broad swath of Americans, rather than a few billionaires.
While liberals have proposed government-funded matching dollars to amplify small donations, Pudner’s approach is to reinstate a 1980s tax credit of $200 for campaign donations…
A third focus Pudner identified centers on disclosure laws, especially as they relate to nonprofits that spend a large share of their money on political activity.
Candidates and Campaigns
Vox: Lessons from the Georgia Sixth District election
By Richard Skinner
The roles played by interest groups and other “party network” actors tell some complicated tales. While the surge of Democratic mobilization has exploded the ranks of local party activists, it has also fueled the growth of organizations outside the formal party, such as Indivisible. One could imagine how such groups could be problematic, given the GOP’s complicated history with the Tea Party…
The NRA and Planned Parenthood, two huge (and popular) issue groups with strong party ties, mostly stuck to actions that would help “their side” capture the Sixth. The Congressional Leadership Fund, under the control of the House GOP, followed the same path as other Republican organizations.
It’s hard to see why groups like the CLF shouldn’t be considered de facto party committees. It’s also true that it’s hard to see the justification for a campaign finance system that leads to odd workarounds like the CLF to accomplish ordinary party functions. The role of the Club for Growth is more troubling, given its heavy activity in Republican primaries on behalf of highly ideological candidates and its backing by a small number of wealthy donors. But the story of the Georgia Sixth was mostly of parties able to accomplish their goals under unusual conditions.
The States
U.S. News & World Report: North Carolina Judges Back Governor Over Election Changes
By Emery P. Dalesio, Associated Press
North Carolina judges on Friday put a temporary brake on renewed efforts by Republican state lawmakers to curtail the new Democratic governor’s control over state and local elections.
A panel of state trial court judges voted 2-1 to stop a new law from taking effect Monday until a more extensive hearing on May 10. The panel’s majority said Gov. Roy Cooper was likely to succeed in challenging a law GOP legislators passed this week diluting the ability governors have had for more than a century to pick election board majorities.
State Senate leader Phil Berger blasted the temporary restraining order…
The temporary freeze “is little different than the legislating from the bench they specifically promised they would not do,” Berger said in a prepared statement. “They have taken the first, disturbing step toward giving Roy Cooper total control of the board responsible for regulating his own ethics and campaign finance conduct, and we will continue to defend the law evenly dividing elections and ethics enforcement between both political parties.”
Seattle Times: Campaign-finance case against the Freedom Foundation is sent to AG’s office
By Joseph O’Sullivan
The Washington Public Disclosure Commission (PDC) has referred a campaign-disclosure complaint against the right-leaning Freedom Foundation to the Attorney General’s Office.
The complaint stems from Freedom Foundation’s opposition last year to a proposed income tax that appeared on the city of Olympia’s election ballot.
That proposal, known as Initiative 1, failed in the November election.
Filed in January by a member of the Northwest Accountability Project, the complaint alleged that the nonprofit Freedom Foundation was in fact a political committee for weighing in on the ballot measure, and should have disclosed its spending.
A PDC investigation found there wasn’t evidence to show the Freedom Foundation fit the definition of a political committee.
